Somebody told me recently that
I should write a poem for myself,
They do not know that I have left a piece of me
inside of you, and I have left you in every poem
previous to this——
but that is beside the point. For now
I imagine you are standing at a kitchen
counter chopping olives in half so you can
swallow them without chewing.
I am sitting in my living room considering
what it would be like to stick my face
into a blizzard, feel flakes of me parting
in the pursuit of snow.
I am considering fragility——
beauty in decomposition.
The way my limbs would fall off and roll
underneath the coffee table.
I am considering
the ways I have been reached
for. I am considering
the ways I have been swallowed
whole. Like the olives,
I imagine myself as dark and rounded,
filled with pimentos and a habitual feeling
of a cutting board below me and
a paring knife above. It is in this moment
of entirety before the wound that I
take a moment to consider this impracticality:
serene, my hands to my sides——this is the way I lie
before you. I’m rabid, walking calmly towards a gun.
I am eager, and I am adulterated in this.
When all is said and done,
when I sit in the pit of your stomach waiting
to dissolve, it is in you that I will leave this poem
for myself. It is through this dissolution
that I will become whole.